Invading the Sacred by Krishnan Ramaswamy

However, a powerful counterforce within the American Academy is systematically undermining core icons and ideals of Indic Culture and thought.

Reginald Horsman, quoted in Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co., p.India, once a major civilizational and economic power that suffered centuries of decline, is now newly resurgent in business, geopolitics and culture.

White Americans could rest easier and the sufferings of other races could be blamed on the racial weakness rather than on whites’ relentless search for wealth and power. If the United States was to remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained for great deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise to power and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. wanted personal success and wealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. Antonio de Nicolas, Krishnan Ramaswamy, and Aditi Banerjee (eds.) (2007), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis Of Hinduism Studies In America (Publisher: Rupa & Co., p.

Richard Slotkin as quoted in Invading the Sacred, 254.

According to this mythic-historiography, the conquest of the wilderness and the subjugation or displacement of the Native Americans who originally inhabited it have been the means to our achievement of a national identity, a democratic polity, an ever-expanding economy, and a phenomenally dynamic and ‘progressive’ civilization.1

The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest and most characteristic myth, expressed in a body of literature, folklore, ritual, historiography, and polemics produced over a period of three centuries.

This period of time became romanticized and idealized in literature and art to form a myth. The American frontier occurred throughout the 17th to 20th centuries as European Americans colonized and expanded across North America. The frontier is the concept of a place that exists at the edge of a civilization, particularly during a period of expansion. The frontier myth or myth of the West is one of the influential myths in American culture.

Invading the Sacred by Krishnan Ramaswamy